Oklahoma Hospitals Lose Fight In Medicare Payment Dispute

A federal court ruled against two Oklahoma hospitals that had alleged the government arbitrarily denied them access to supplemental Medicare reimbursement.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday found that Medicare’s internal adjudicators didn’t act arbitrarily when they excluded psychiatric units at two facilities under the Baptist Health Care of Oklahoma health system from receiving additional payments for treating a disproportionate share of low-income patients.

The Medicare program offers supplemental payments to facilities that treat a larger-than-normal number of low-income patients, the rationale being that “’low-income individuals are often more expensive to treat than’ others, ‘even ...